Southwest Museum in Los Angeles put up for sale

The historic Southwest Museum in Los Angeles officially was put up for sale by the Autry Museum of the American West 16 years after its merger.

According to LAist, the Autry spent about $20 million on renovations and upkeep since acquiring the property in 2003.

“The future has arrived,” Autry president and CEO W. Richard West Jr. told KPCC’s The Frame. “I want that site to be viable, in ways that it cannot be [now].”

The Autry will maintain ownership of the Southwest’s vast collections of Native American baskets, ceramics, blankets, and more — around 400,000 objects total. Most of the collections are currently housed in the Autry’s Resources Center in Burbank, scheduled to open by appointment to scholars and researchers in 2020.

The Los Angeles Times reported a day before the property went on the market:

Faced with renovations estimated to run into the tens of millions of dollars in order for the Southwest to reopen fully as a museum, the Autry is looking for someone else to manage and own the property while respecting its history. That someone else could be a museum, university, nonprofit or other cultural institution — or, the Autry said, commercial entities including a restaurant, retail or housing that partner with such cultural organizations.

The Autry said in a best-case scenario, the new owner would partner with the Autry on educational programming, exhibitions and events related to the Southwest Museum’s collection. […]

More than 100 years old, both the museum and adobe are challenging, the Autry said. The museum campus has many levels of stairs, so wheelchair access is a problem. Seismic and other structural upgrades are needed. Parking is limited, although the campus sits next to the Metro Gold Line. The Autry estimates that reactivating the space as a museum would cost “tens of millions of dollars,” and reactivating the adobe as an educational or cultural space would be an additional $5 million to $7 million.

The Southwest Museum of the American Indian, perched atop Mount Washington near an alignment of Route 66, opened to the public in 1914 after founder Charles Lummis moved the museum from downtown Los Angeles to there. In 2015, the Southwest Museum was designated a national treasure by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. It’s been on the National Register of Historic Places since 2004.

(Image of the Southwest Museum in Los Angeles by J Jakobson via Flickr)